Back to School – Notebook Paper Tags Tutorial

Who’s ready for back to school? My three-year-old is starting pre-preschool this fall, so technically he’s not going “back”. It’s only going to be two days a week, but I’m pretty sure you can hear my mom-heart breaking over here! I made these little notebook paper tags to make myself feel better. They end up just about business card size and are perfect for adding onto backpacks and jackets – the things kids are so good at losing!

These instructions are for making more than one tag at a time. If you only want to make one, you’ll need a piece of fabric about 4″ x 3″ so that you can trim it to the proper size after stitching.

Cut a long 3″ wide strip of the white knit fabric. You don’t need to worry about these stretching, so you can cut whichever way it fits on your scraps.

Use your blue thread to make a straight stitch about 1/4″ from one long edge.

Don’t worry about the ruffling – we’ll take care of that in a minute. Continue making long blue lines across your fabric strip. After the first one, I lined up the edge of my walking foot with the previous line.

Don’t go all the way to the top edge. You want to leave a header of about three quarters of an inch.

Get our your iron and steam that strip! Or do what I do and spray the fabric with water, then use a hot, dry iron. This will get out all the wrinkles and waves and give you crisp looking “paper”.

Use your rotary cutter to cut 2.5″ pieces. Make sure to trim off that ugly edge first.

Switch to your red thread. Lay a piece of tissue paper under the tag and line up the edge with your walking foot. Make one line of straight stitching on each tag.

Tear the tissue paper away. You could do this without the tissue paper, but it really keeps the edge from getting dragged down by the feed dogs and looking munched. I definitely recommend it!

Ta-da! Notebook paper tags! Use a fine-tipped Sharpie to write your kid’s name and any other info you like. I found it helps to stretch the “paper” slightly to make a taut area to write on. Be sure to iron for about 30 seconds to heat set the ink.

Pin into place at the four corners to keep things straight and use a small zig zag stitch to secure. Because the fabric is knit, you don’t have to worry about it fraying at the edges.

Thanks for having me as part of your Back to School Series, Jonie! I loved making these for my son and will probably add them to everything now! If you liked this tutorial, I’d love for you to check out all the fun stuff we have going on at FriendsStitchedTogether!